14) Muzak

It beggars belief how many establishments still get this wrong.  6 out of 10 establishments that play piped music, play muzak.

Muzak or elevator/lobby music – the precursor to aural bleeding, the soundtrack to moments spent waiting to speak to a human on the phone and that song that perforates your brain as you try to fall asleep – muzak is a scourge that is far too often overlooked.  You would have thought that in this day and age, with so much pirated music flying around, someone could make a mix tape that doesn’t encourage self-harm, but somehow, Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ still seems to be the pan-pipe spectacular of choice.

It blows my mind how hotels and shopping malls have made just about every amenity in the world available to me - from a spot of midget bowling before tea to a bathtub full of m&ms or dead-skin eating fish pedicures.  But ask someone to rub two braincells together to come up with some decent music to play in public, and you’re up against a quandary the size of mass potty-training.  Some of the best known establishments in the world, from their cafes or restaurants to boutiques or recreation areas, still play music that makes me want to peel off my skin and jump into a tub of Tabasco.

I’ll take the bad service. I’ll swallow the Starbuck’s cheesecake that tastes like rubber with air jus.  I’ll even tip you because you insist it’s a custom despite the service charge on the bill and your personality disorder…but please leave my ears alone.  There’s only so much ‘Love Is All Around Me’ on piano that I can listen to in one sitting.

And there’s a science to it too.

• take an already overplayed artist’s entire back catalogue
• examples include (but are not exclusive to) Kenny G, Take That, any 80s band, any 90s boyband, Celine Dion, Crazy Frog, Britney, The Vengaboys, ABBA, five tribute bands to ABBA, Steps, Air Supply, Roxette, Ace of Base and The Beatles
• and re-record it instrumentally on pan pipes, a saxophone, a cheap synthesiser or with an overly unctuous pianist - you know the one…who does lots of glides, deep tinkling and unnecessary flourishes – with his eyes closed…(shudder)

Thus will you inadvertently drive entire hoards of people into the human equivalent of rabidly frothing mung beans.  And who makes this stuff?  Can you imagine an orchestra-grade MIDI composer putting his soul into a rendition of Bryan Adams’ ‘Summer of 69’ on a PC?  Do muzakians do jams of piano and panpipes in rages of inspiration when they play Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’?  Do these people truly represent the ‘tortured artist’ by passing on the pain so effectively to all of us?  Can we somehow get them on a list that means they never see daylight again?  Please?

I know some restauranteurs have a rule-of-thumb that they want people to spend less time at their establishments so more people can come in.  But if your clientele have become lobe-deficient lumps from over exposure to instrumental ‘My Heart Will Go On’, there’s a very slim chance that they’ll be able to chew their food, let alone leave your establishment wilfully when they go into a coma on the fourth listening of ‘Backstreet’s Back’ on harp.

And it just gets worse.  Establishments in Dubai allow their staff to make their own mixes.  This in itself isn’t bad, but when people take some of the most haematoma-inducing ballads and record their friends singing a karaoke version of it in their living rooms, muzak is mutating at a frightening speed.  And just try complaining.  It’s one thing if you snipe about Celine Dion, which might merely result in some phlegm in your frappucino (Celine Dion is a deity in some countries where karaoke machines are treated as gateways to her power).  But complain about their flatmate’s Pop Idol-wannabe cousin and you’re looking at some sort of gang retribution.  You’re making it personal esse.

This isn’t a snob thing. This isn’t a taste thing.  It’s a human torture thing.  Can you imagine what would happen at high-security prisons if they played this stuff on repeat.  You’d end up with a mental asylum in less than a week.  The Geneva Convention and terrorism manuals would have to be rewritten because you’d also have developed some kind of new torture.  Can you imagine squadrons of suicide karaoke-killers running around Swat Valley or Kandahar with ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ playing on repeat?  Our troops wouldn’t stand a chance.  Neither would the killers.

I have a plan.  Why don’t we somehow convince the Taliban that companies that record muzak are all somehow ‘cultural’.  If we divert their attention to eradicating the world of the symphonic reprobates that are Kenny-G esque saxophone cover musicians, we could kill two birds with one stone.  Muzak would have a fatwa issued against it and from over-exposure to ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ on sax, the Taleban will slowly turn its attention to those champions of pop music tragedy - Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest.  Pop Idol goes high on the Taleban’s Most Wanted list.  Who’s with me?

And in the end, we can all go back to restaurants and hotels without any danger of turning into rabidly frothing mung beans.